Rumor confirmed: Radioactive dogs exploded in Clarksville

Some 'Birdcage' secrets unlocked

Jun. 15, 2012

The now-steamy underground storage bunkers at Clarksville Base featured blast doors, bank vault doors, and more doors beyond those, requiring both a civilian and a military representative to open them to ensure no one person could enter, no matter what their security level was. / COURTESY OF BRIG. GEN. DON F. PRATT MUSEUM

Written by

Leaf-Chronicle

FORT CAMPBELL, KY. — If you think Cold War paranoia went away with the Berlin Wall, think again.

Not far from Clarksville and hard by Main Post at Fort Campbell, what remains of Clarksville Base – once a repository for one-third of America’s nuclear weapons capability – still holds on to a few secrets fully 47 years after it ceased operations. And even though a lot of the story has been declassified, much of it hasn’t, and there is still enough lingering skittishness to cause certain topics, and certain rumors, to remain off-limits.

Fortunately, historian John O’Brien of Fort Campbell’s Brig. Gen. Don F. Pratt Museum is happy to tell some of what he knows. Some of it, despite the deadly seriousness of what went on at the “Birdcage,” is unintentionally funny – in hindsight.

Base facts

It needs saying up front that the following is in no way a definitive history. An Internet search for “Clarksville Base” will provide a fuller picture, but on the 70th anniversary of Fort Campbell, a couple of stories and facts about the post’s non-tourable tourist attraction are in order.

“Clarksville Base was a Special Weapons Storage area equipped to arm and maintain atomic weapons from 1947 to 1965,” O’Brien said. “It was shrouded in the secrecy accorded to the most vital of America’s national defense interests. Much of its history remains obscure and classified.”

Clarksville Base remains the best-preserved example of the 13 original special weapons storage facilities, and it is a genuine Cold War artifact.

The name was originally Clarksville Air Force Base, which was shortened to Clarksville Base in 1949. It was deemed “excess property” and turned over to Fort Campbell in 1969.

It was the third of the special weapons storage areas; thus its distinction of having, at one time, one-third of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. It was also high on the Soviet Union’s targeting list, according to declassified post-Cold War documents.

Security consciousness

Clarksville Base was also known as “the Birdcage,” supposedly because of the triple rows of fencing surrounding the place, the innermost of which was electrified.

The fence was foreboding and unfriendly looking while being a dead giveaway that something was going on over on the other side that was probably not a YMCA youth camp. And the electrical part of the fence worked as advertised in several cases, one of which involved a hapless trainee trying to escape basic training at Fort Campbell in the 1960s, thinking that Clarksville, the city, was on the other side of the fence. It was, but as bad luck would have it, you had to first get through a top secret nuclear facility guarded by Marines with “shoot to kill” orders, and before you got to them, there was an electric fence.

Another instance involved the death of the only confirmed actual for-real spy caught in the area (as far as we know). An agent for either the East Germans or the Czechs managed to make his way into the elite Marine guard force that was stationed at the base until his career was short-circuited by vigilance and the electric fence, but mostly by the electric fence.

The 'Big Bopper'

One person who did manage to make it over the fence was a commander of the base, which was run on the military side by the U.S. Navy. Adm. John D. Buckley was a legendary character whose big claim to fame prior to his assignment here was that he received the Medal of Honor in World War II for commanding the PT boats that got MacArthur out of the Philippines.

“As far as security consciousness,” O’Brien said, “he was all over it.”

Buckley’s call sign was the “Big Bopper” and he rode around the base endlessly in a little Triumph automobile, looking for any laxity in security.

Buckley bet the Marines he could sneak onto the base and plant bombs.

“They bet he couldn’t,” O’Brien said. “Buckley said, ‘Sometime this week, I will sneak in.’ He did. He put on a rubber scuba suit and used some rubber mats to climb over the fence, while carrying some five-gallon paint cans with him on which he had written, ‘This is a bomb. Got you.’

Next morning, Buckley called the Marines out and apparently fired them all and sent them back to the fleet. Told them they were all worthless.”

This was in the very early 1960’s and Buckley’s next assignment was as the commander of “Gitmo” – Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – during the Cuban missile crisis.

“He was totally out of control,” O’Brien said. “They had to rein him in. He had all kinds of plans to sneak out of Gitmo to take out the Cuban electrical infrastructure. He was a commando on the go.”

Minor major incident

Rumors have circulated for years about accidents at the base that nearly turned the area into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Most of those proceed from the assumption that nuclear devices are like vials of nitroglycerin that explode when dropped or when someone plays the radio a little too loud.

Actually, because people who worked with nukes feared death like everyone else, there were rather a lot of safeguards built in to make sure nukes didn’t go off when dropped or bumped with an elbow or the janitor’s mop handle.

O’Brien sheepishly admits to being the source of one apocalyptic tale that others have embellished since he first told it at a reunion of Clarksville Base workers.

In the course of time, the story has come down that a trainload of nukes on flatcars careened wildly off the tracks, spilling atomic bombs all over the place and threatening to lower property values in North Clarksville for decades due to spontaneous nuclear combustion and radioactive contamination.

The actual story is kind of funny.

On Feb. 10, 1960, a train engineer left off the parking brake, and the train rolled down to the end of the line near the big crane. There were three cars carrying nukes and one went off the track, though it didn’t tip over.

“It was an incredibly minor incident,” O’Brien said, “but the security monitoring of this stuff was intense, and letters showed a chain of reporting that went all the way to the head of the Senate oversight committee.”

When he told the story at the reunion, a guy in the back of the room raised his hand, admitting he was the engineer and totally unaware for years that his slip-up went all the way up the chain.

This is not to say that serious incidents didn’t take place, and we may find out about one or two in the future, maybe, when some clerk gets around to declassifying the huge piles of documents that remain to be reviewed.

Exploding dog incident

Cold War aficionados will recognize the term, “Broken Arrow Team.” A Broken Arrow incident was anything involving nukes that went awry, at which point a special team would be sent out to cover it up and keep the press away while they fixed whatever had gone wrong.

On one end of the scale was the B-52 bomber that accidentally dropped four H-bombs near Palomares, Spain.

On the other end of the scale was Clarksville’s exploding radioactive dog incident.

In the early 1960s, which was sort of a peak for Cold War weirdness, it got in the head of someone at the University of Chicago to do an experiment on the effect of gamma radiation on organic flesh. The boys at Oak Ridge, Tenn., obliged by killing a bunch of dogs with radiation and then packing and sealing them in 55-gallon drums.

A courier was dispatched with the drums on a flatbed truck. “So this courier was bringing these irradiated dogs through Clarksville on up to Chicago,” O’Brien said, “and he had a girlfriend that worked at a little hamburger stand that was at the corner of Kraft and Riverside.

“So he pulls in for lunch on a July day in Clarksville, and he and his girlfriend decided to have more than a burger, and he leaves the truck.”

July heat in Clarksville and 55-gallon drums filled with irradiated dogs left to cook in the sun just has to be a bad combination, and it was. “The pressure and the heat inside the drums just kept building up,” O’Brien continued, “and a couple of them exploded.”

“You had these irradiated dog parts on the corner there, and a (Clarksville Base) Broken Arrow team came and cleaned up the mess and made sure the public didn’t find out about it. The dog parts were buried on Clarksville Base at a location known to the Tennessee EPA.”

It was a real Cold War nuclear accident, and it happened here in Clarksville. And now, at long last, you know.